Cavalry Needs a Nerf

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I know I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this, but cav in multiplayer really needs to be nerfed.

I've experienced multiple times not being able to do anything against cav when playing infantry. If the cav player has a large shield, the shield even protects their horse when you try to lance it, so you can't hit the horse. If you do manage to hit the horse, if it has any armor it takes 3-4 hits with a spear to kill it. So even if you do manage to stop/stun the horse, the player can double tap W to sprint away before you can even manage to get more hits in. Not even mentioning that if using a spear you'll glance half the time and do no damage anyway.

You can't protect yourself from cav either because if they are charging at you the momentum with the hitboxes and the length of their lance can out range pretty much everything except a pike. And if you try to block with your shield they can just bump you to drop your shield and get a hit in on the same pass through.

9 times out of 10 doing any 6v6 skirmish or clan battle the top players are cav players because there is nothing that can be done against them unless they are so bad that they allow archers to kill their horse.

I think the solution is mainly to not make shields able to block any portion of the horse's body, and to reduce the ability for a horse to escape situations when at a complete stop. That way they are punished more for diving into the middle of an infantry fight
 
Everything has been nerfed and now the game is less fun than it was during beta. Just go play something else if you don't like it.
 
Everything has been nerfed and now the game is less fun than it was during beta. Just go play something else if you don't like it.
The game hasn't even "fully released" yet, so it's still important to provide feedback to make the game better and more balanced. I played the beta back in 2020 and combat feels much better now than it did then. I want to see the game succeed as much as possible to keep new players from being discouraged and also provide a balanced system for competitive players. Saying "just go play something else" isn't very constructive
 
As to cav and why they topscore:
Cavalry are the damage dealers of your team, while the task of infantry, much like in warfare it always was, is to take in the damage if necessary and hold areas.
You can't win a flag fight just by cav and cav alone can often do nothing if their inf is not enabling them so each of both do their job.
As for public: they're way too uncoordinated, so cav goes rampage there, because people are not aware of their location or have neither the knowledge nor means of skill to stop a good player.


We can talk about balance to many lengths, but it's the usual sorting of the table that cavs on top and stems from the nature of the class.
 
The game hasn't even "fully released" yet, so it's still important to provide feedback to make the game better and more balanced. I played the beta back in 2020 and combat feels much better now than it did then. I want to see the game succeed as much as possible to keep new players from being discouraged and also provide a balanced system for competitive players. Saying "just go play something else" isn't very constructive
We've seen considerable nerfs that have affected every class in the game already. Spears, throwing weapons and archery are all counters to cavalry that have been significantly nerfed. Limiting the player on what they can do is not a fun way to balance the game.
 
The game hasn't even "fully released" yet, so it's still important to provide feedback to make the game better and more balanced. I played the beta back in 2020 and combat feels much better now than it did then. I want to see the game succeed as much as possible to keep new players from being discouraged and also provide a balanced system for competitive players. Saying "just go play something else" isn't very constructive
Bark's opinion became irrelevant to me after the first time I saw him spamming slurs in chat. Every time he's done it since then has just reinforced my belief that he should not be taken seriously.
 
Just make it so they can't use a lance to hit you from point blank, it's physically impossible. Then if they want to forcefully end the fight they are forced to engage in a battle where people can possibly react. So to stop a cavalry from overpowering you with bump attacking, you can actually hit them first. You might notice they can hit the horse first because it sticks out further. That's how you have to trade off if you want to force an infantry to die without being able to respond. 1: skillfully outrange them with your longer ranged lance and repetition hoping to catch them making a mistake. 2 Pull out your sidearm and charge your cavalry into them to force their block down, risk getting hit first and losing the chance to attack. Also opening your horse up to take free damage as it ploughs through infantry head on in order to give you the opportunity to hit people for free without them being able to block. Balanced because it stops the currently broken interaction between the outranging people with the lance or bumping down their shield combination. It also increases the range of tactics available to cavalry by having them actually use the sidearms on horseback every now and then. Because they no longer can force you to hold up your shield when they are engaging with a longer range weapon while retaining the threat of bumping down your block anyways if you try to stop there hit from farther away. If cavalry wants to end the fight in a 1v1 quickly they risk getting stricken first and losing their attack and they also assuredly will take damage to their horse that is in front of them. The infantry has to decide if they want to gamble swinging against a longer ranged sidearm or stab into the horse charging them. This is no longer taken away because cavalry is holding a lance that outranges you. For anyone saying this would nerf cavalry you're wrong actually. This is a very specific scenario that won't effect 90% of how cavalry engages in it's ideal way. Typically, cavalry, rides around at full speed and wants to stab anyone who isn't paying attention in the back. This is for those rare situations when cavalry doesn't do that. When they want to kill one specific person that is paying attention to them. Because in -this- fight. The game is BROKEN.
 
I agree that cavalry's shield coverage against melee attacks is too generous. This was a problem in Warband too. You can be hitting the horse but somehow the rider's shield will absorb the attack. I'm guessing the hit detection is either awkwardly setup or it's done deliberately to make cavalry OP.

Right now, with the cavalry double-tapping feature (and no cooldown), you can do this ...



... and the rider will shout "yah!" rapidly in an unnatural way if you keep double-tapping W into an object ...



... it can also be silly and unbalanced in more general gameplay (together with the cavalry's ability to bounce unaffected off walls) ...



However, rather than more nerfing, what I'd like to see most of all is improvements to infantry and polearms. And I'm not talking about slapdash perk changes (or any similar shortcut design). The game mechanically needs to improve for fun and balance.
 
- Reduce horses movement speed based on horse armor a lot more
- Increase infantry and archer movement speed proportionally so it doesn't affect archer vs inf.

Done.
 
Bring back the ability to swing through the horse and hit the rider, bracing and stopping horses should be the same, but allowing you to hit the rider and stun him will do wonders for making inf better at dealing with cav, that way it also fixes fyren's point blank spear stab issues, and removes the ability for cav to use their horses as meat shields for free hits.
 
- Reduce overall horse speed significantly
- Make stopping cavalry not tied to a perk only 1 class have access to
- Make cavalry consistantly run into wall and get stunned at high speed
- Make stopping the horse consistant, ties together with removing cavalry breaker
- Change the cone of stopping cav to only rear from the front of the horse
- If a cavalry runs into a friendly infantry, the cavaly gets punished by being stopped instead of pushing the infantry to the side

For a start. After that we can look at the details like attack speed etc.
 
As to cav and why they topscore:
Cavalry are the damage dealers of your team, while the task of infantry, much like in warfare it always was, is to take in the damage if necessary and hold areas.
You can't win a flag fight just by cav and cav alone can often do nothing if their inf is not enabling them so each of both do their job.
As for public: they're way too uncoordinated, so cav goes rampage there, because people are not aware of their location or have neither the knowledge nor means of skill to stop a good player.


We can talk about balance to many lengths, but it's the usual sorting of the table that cavs on top and stems from the nature of the class.
The nature of the class is the problem. It's faster, deals more damage, tanks more damage, disables enemies just by touching them, can perform unblockable hits via bump stabs, can strike you silently in the back at mach 3, has a weapon that outranges most spears, and has a very generous shield hitbox. I've seen walls of infantry at a chokepoint with spears and a single cav can just smash straight through them. There's no counter to a cav 1v1, except maybe an archer with all the anti-cav perks in a position that is unreachable by horses.

And there's no punishment for their mistakes, besides a very brief window where they are immobile that's not even long enough for you to switch weapons. They ride directly into your spear thrust and mistime their lance stab so that they don't kill you first? You stop their horse for a second and then they ride away. They ride into a crowd of teammates? The teammates just get pushed out of the way. They ride into a crowd of enemies? All the enemies get disabled. They ride at top speed straight into a wall? They stop for a second. They ride off a cliff? Take a little bit of damage and just keep riding at top speed.
 
I remember some warband mods made horses run slower the lower their health was. It would definitely take some fine-tuning to implement well, but could be a step in the right direction for cav balance.
 
Devs have been told endlessly the fixes cav needs. They don't seem to care. One last time:

- Reduce their top speed. Half the sound problem is they are going lightspeed.
- Add "stun" on a blocked polearm, rework the upperstab to start more forward. Upstab at pointblack range from horseback is more effective spam than an inf with a 1 hander. (this also fixes melee javs)
- Make full speed collisions rear up cav, make colliding with another horse rear up cav. Mass cav wouldn't be as near as effective if they couldn't use each other as bumpers.
- Amend polearm rear up to simple be on successful hit at a certain speed, not requiring a damage threshold. Devs reasoning was they didn't want cav permanently reared - if cav are stupid enough to be riding into polearm after polearm, they should be.
- Stop them moving people around, friend and foe. It's bump or nothing. This is only there because of ****ing bots in singeplayer. It has no place in multiplayer and is incredibly annoying as well as low skill for cav.
- As all of the above are nerfs, cav should get a slight manoeuvrability buff especially at lower speeds, they feel like tanks atm and also is why they drift.
 
I do not understand reducing the cav speed even further, heavy cav is slow af as it is, basically you have to take agile/faster horse or nothing if you want to move around, slowing it even further is just not justifiable.
I agree cavs should be reared from running into each other.
Fun fact if you know you're about to get reared up because you're going too fast towards a wall you can deny the rear up by jumping, horse will hit the wall but because of the animation of jumping, you won't get reared lol.
 
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